Laocoön and His Sons

Interesting facts

Pliny described the group as carved from a single block, but it is actually made of at least seven interlocking pieces of marble.

Some scholars have even argued that the statue is a Renaissance forgery by the young Michelangelo, though this remains a minority view.

The names of the same three Rhodian sculptors are inscribed on marble groups found at Emperor Tiberius's seaside villa at Sperlonga.

The outstretched right arm that the priest held for centuries was a restoration made by Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli in 1532.

The bent original arm, reattached in 1957, matched the position Michelangelo is said to have proposed for the missing limb.

Pope Leo X commissioned a marble copy from Baccio Bandinelli, which now stands in the Uffizi in Florence.

For Francis I of France a bronze was cast from moulds taken under Primaticcio's supervision; it is now in the Louvre.

A woodcut caricature attributed to Titian, from around 1520, parodied the group with three apes in place of the priest and his sons.

Lessing used the statue as the starting point for a famous essay on the different limits of painting and poetry.

In one ancient version of the myth, told by Sophocles, the serpents killed only the sons while Laocoön survived to grieve.

Why it is worth it

Laocoön and His Sons is the marble group that launched the Vatican Museums. It was dug up in early 1506 in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill in Rome, and Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo to look at it; Michelangelo went too. It was quickly recognised as the Laocoön described by Pliny the Elder, who knew it in the palace of Emperor Titus and called it preferable to all other painting and sculpture. Julius bought it in March, and by August it was on public display in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican, where it has remained ever since.

The group, just over 2 m high, shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by sea serpents, the punishment for warning the Trojans against the wooden horse. Pliny named three sculptors from Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. Whether the work is an original or a copy of an earlier bronze is still debated, and proposed dates range from 200 BC to the 70s AD, with the early imperial period now favoured. The style is Hellenistic "baroque": look at the priest's straining torso, the furrowed brow that an anatomist once called physiologically impossible, and the way the serpents bind the three figures into one struggle while the elder son seems about to break free.

The statue's arms tell their own story. Laocoön's right arm was missing when it was found, and for centuries it carried a heroically outstretched restoration. In 1905 the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak found a bent marble arm in a builder's yard near the findspot and gave it to the Vatican; in 1957 it was recognised as the original and reattached, and when the group was dismantled and reassembled in the 1980s the later restorations of the sons' arms were removed. The work shaped Italian sculpture into the Baroque period, and Michelangelo in particular was struck by it.

Getting there

The group is displayed in the Octagonal Court of the Museo Pio-Clementino, part of the Vatican Museums, whose entrance is on Viale Vaticano. Rome Ciampino Airport (CIA) is about 13 km away and Fiumicino (FCO) about 21 km.

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From the encyclopaedia

The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and put on public display in the Vatican Museums, where it remains today. The statue is very likely the same one praised in the highest terms by Pliny the Elder, the main Roman writer on art, who attributed it to Greek sculptors but did not say when it was created. The figures are nearly life-sized, with the entire group measuring just over 2 m in height. The sculpture depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia